Laughter Over Water
by Lomonaaeren
Summary: HPDM slash, background HPGW. Harry, near the end of his life, remembers a strange fling he had with Draco. COMPLETE.


**Title:** Laughter Over Water  
 **Disclaimer:** J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.  
 **Pairing:** Harry/Draco, Harry/Ginny  
 **Rating** : Soft R  
 **Content Notes:** Angst, major character death, past character deaths mentioned, epilogue-compliant, present tense  
 **Wordcount:** 2300  
 **Summary:** Harry, near the end of his life, remembers a strange fling he had with Draco.  
 **Author's Notes:** The next of my July Celebration fics. Although I suppose, in this case, "celebration" is an inappropriate term.

 **Laughter Over Water**

Harry closes his eyes. He knows that he won't see another sunset. But he's had enough of them. He turns himself slowly away from the windows, and lies there, breathing harshly, but hard for him to hear, with the deafness that's taken him now.

He's outlasted Ginny by three years. The house always seemed too cold and empty without her, but he stayed for the sake of his new great-grandchild, his youngest granddaughter's little boy. Amaranth told him, with tears in her eyes, that she couldn't imagine raising Remus by herself. And Harry stayed as long as he could.

But now, his magic is softly leaving him. It's his will, to follow Ginny into death, and he can't hold himself back now that Remus is four and jumping on brooms by himself, and Amaranth has found a new man to marry, having got over her boy's worthless father.

Harry smiles at the thought, but the smile slips as he imagines Lily and Al coming in tomorrow and finding him dead. Not James. He died of a curse ten years ago. He was an Auror, like his Dad, and it caught up with him the way it never caught up with Harry.

 _It's not right, for a man to outlive his son._

Harry sighs. He thinks the sorrow took six years to kill Ginny, but it did, in the end. And he…

He doesn't want to think about James tonight, his last night on earth. He doesn't want to think about Al's and Lily's expressions when they find him in the morning. They will. Nothing he can do about that.

He wants to think about something else, instead. One of those memories he never wrote down, never spoke about, only carried in his heart. But for all that, it's as clear as a crystal that receives endless polishing.

Harry's mind goes back. And back. And he's there again, in the summer after he went back and finished up his NEWT's at Hogwarts, and was getting ready for the Auror training program, and trying to decide whether he really wanted to date Ginny after all…

* * *

"Malfoy?"

It's not what Harry expected, to come on Malfoy standing in a whirl of autumn leaves in the middle of the Forbidden Forest. Especially not when it's summer, and all the other trees around him are green.

Malfoy turns around. His pale hair is full of amber leaves, and coper, and umber. He smiles at Harry and says, "Did you ever think about what happens when someone just disappears? I mean, they disappear instead of die. They go into _silence_ , don't they? Because they'll never come back and tell you their stories, and the people who love them never hear from them again."

Harry stares at him. "Malfoy, what are you going on about?" He thinks the Malfoys did well enough for themselves after the war, what with Lucius getting no time in Azkaban and Narcissa being hailed as a hero for saving his life. And Malfoy got to come to Hogwarts and get his NEWTS like anyone else.

"I'm so tired of talking," Malfoy says softly, suddenly, his eyes fixed on Harry's. "So many words. Too many."

Harry stays there, because it's something he's felt, but never had the words for. "What are you going on about?" he ends up repeating, lamely.

Malfoy steps forwards, and kisses him. It's an open-mouthed kiss, quiet, and Harry could resist it if he wants to. But he doesn't want to, and he lets Malfoy lower him to the forest floor, and replace his mouth with his hands.

The autumn leaves continue to whirl down upon them from the sky the entire time.

* * *

A cough jolts Harry from the memories, and he grimaces and presses a hand against his side. He can feel the soft bleeding there, although there's no pain. It's not technically a physical bleeding; it's a combination of his magic leaving him and his organs shutting down because there's not enough life-force to sustain them anymore.

Well, the cough and the blood can bloody well leave him alone for right now, Harry thinks, pleased with his absurd little pun. He closes his eyes and immerses himself in the next time he met Draco; that's the way he thinks of him now, always, although he was still calling him Malfoy in his head at the time.

There's many reasons he's never spoken of this to anyone else, but one of them is that, this way, he doesn't have to choose what his audience would _think_ Draco should be called.

* * *

He and Draco have met in the forest so many times now that Harry's come to think of it as their natural place. Even though he knows it can't be. _I mean,_ he thinks, as he pushes through a handful of leaves and comes to the small pond that Draco told him to find, _what will happen when the summer ends? I have to go to Auror training, and he must have_ something _that he'll be doing. He bothered to pass his NEWTS, after all._

His breath catches and his mind flies away from marks when he sees Draco crouched at the edge of the pond. The water is stormy grey, a match for his eyes when he smiles up at Harry, and he extends his hand and snaps his fingers commandingly. Harry kneels down next to him, resting a hand lightly on his arm for balance.

"Can you see them?" Draco whispers.

Harry looks down, and nods. He can indeed see the ripples spreading out from where Draco probably tossed a stone in, or maybe a leaf fell. He watches them plash against the bank before he turns his head to look at Draco questioningly.

Draco is smiling in utter delight. This will forever be Harry's favorite memory of him: tilting his head back a little so a stripe of sunshine falls on his face, one hand trailing in the dove-hued water.

"Do you ever wonder where the ripples go when they touch the bank?"

Harry rolls his eyes and snorts a little. "Not this again, Draco. Not the value of silence." Even though Draco does really seem to value it—he hardly makes any sounds when he and Harry couple, although Harry more than makes up for him—Harry can't see how these random philosophical points link up to their love affair.

"Just think about it. Where do they go?"

Harry tries to think of an argument that will satisfy Draco and dismiss this conversation so they can go on with their lovemaking, but in the end, he has to shake his head. "I don't know," he says. His voice seems caught with yet another ripple on the pond and vanishes.

Draco nods. "That's the point. No one knows. That's what I want. No one knowing."

Harry opens his mouth to ask what he means, but Draco stands and extends his hand. "Come on. We only have so much time, you know."

Harry wants to ask about _that_ , too, but Draco swallows him down with such brisk efficiency that in seconds he's tossing his head back, straining with one hand on the grass at the edge of the pond, gasping, and Draco kisses his palm and banishes Harry's composure to wherever ripples go.

Harry can't lift his head now.

It's all right. He leans it back, and thinks of finally seeing his parents in the afterlife, and Sirius. And Ginny and James, of course.

 _And Draco?_

That was the point of all the silence and the philosophical talk, although Harry didn't know it at the time. Harry doesn't know whether he'll see Draco there.

He's never known.

* * *

Draco wakes him with a hand placed softly across his mouth. Harry blinks at him, and blinks harder when he realizes that he fell asleep on the bank beside the pond.

"They're looking for me," Draco explains, and cocks his head at the two trees that stand like an arched entrance not far away, their branches intertwining. Harry walked through them when he came to join Draco today. "They want me to come back and do what they say, but I never will."

Harry listens. He can hear shouts, sure, but it seems odd to him that someone would have mounted a search for Draco just because he was away for a few hours. Then he hears the bark of what's unmistakably Kingsley's voice, and stares at Draco.

"Why are the _Aurors_ hunting you?"

Draco stands and pulls the robes he shed to be with Harry over his head. "They think I stole some grimoires from stacks the Ministry keeps. They confiscate all these 'Dark' objects from families like mine and then never study them or even give them over to the Department of Mysteries to work on, it's ridiculous." He rolls his eyes.

His pale hair is floating around his head like dandelion fluff. He reaches down and picks up a handful of grass at his feet, and it immediately turns soft and brown. Harry blinks at him. "Did you steal them?"

Draco smiles at him.

"Draco, damn it," Harry snaps, his mind working over the past few months and the bad publicity that's followed the Malfoys around since their trials. "That's going to weigh heavily on your record. I'll have to say—"

"Say nothing," Draco instructs him softly, putting a hand over Harry's lips again. "I don't want you to get in trouble. The value of silence, remember?"

Harry shakes his head, and goes on shaking it until Draco takes his hand away. "But I can be your alibi, or—I mean, I can tell them that—"

"Don't be silly, Harry," Draco says, and steps back from him. His feet shuffle and crack in the grass, and everywhere around him, for a moment, a shimmering glow spreads. Harry can see it turning the leaves on the branches red and gold.

Or is Draco opening a gate in the air, into another place, where the trees look like that…?

"What were the books you took about?" Harry asks, a puff of breath. He doesn't know if Draco can hear him.

But Draco can. Maybe he's tuned to Harry's voice, over the sounds of Aurors blundering around in the Forest and coming ever closer. "Transformation," Draco says, and his smile blazes and leaps like a many-splendored waterfall. "Making yourself into silence, into sound, into leaves, into seasons…"

One of the Aurors says, "This way! I hear someone talking!"

Draco holds out his hand. Not understanding how he knows what to do, Harry stands and walks over to him. Draco leans towards him and kisses him, and then he exhales.

In the next instant, he's gone. Harry turns instinctively to the water, and sees a ripple moving over the surface in the opposite direction from the way they usually go, away from the bank and towards the center.

And there's a ruffle of laughter. Of wind. Of laughter.

He _knows_ he heard it, a chuckle that's there and not there.

When the Aurors burst into the clearing, there's no sign that Draco was ever there. The grass he bent has sprung back up again and turned green once more. The leaves are back on the branches. Even the imprints of his feet in the mud at the very edge of the pond are gone.

The ripple has faded.

* * *

Harry can't open his eyes now.

He never found out what happened. The Aurors, utterly baffled, finally concluded that Draco fled the country with the books he stole. No one ever found them, either. But a book Harry read long afterwards, among the ones in the Black library that Sirius left behind, said something that made him think, that made sense.

 _When one goes through a transformation that is not into another living body, but into a pure elemental force, all magic goes with the one making the transformation. No one will find his wand again._

And the books, too, probably went with him, Harry thought.

Thinks now. It is so hard to draw a breath. It's so hard to think about the people waiting for him.

It's so hard to know why Draco chose Harry to share those last moments with him, or the moments in the months before, as he—probably—studied and perfected the magic that would let him disappear. Just as it's hard to know why he chose to disappear, when things could have got better for his family.

 _Did you ever think about what happens when someone just disappears? I mean, they disappear instead of die. They go into_ silence _, don't they?_

Draco kept his silence, both before and after his disappearance.

Harry feels the staggered beat of his own heart. His magic can't sustain that anymore, either. It's going. It's leaving.

It's vanishing.

Harry smiles. He has time for three more thoughts.

The first, that he's never regretted any decision he made. Including the one to marry Ginny, to have his children, to keep living for the rest of his family when James died, to continue living for Amaranth and Remus when Ginny died, to let go now.

Including the one he made to lie to the Aurors about what he knew about Draco.

The second, that he _likes_ to think Draco had the transformation perfected when Harry first met him in the Forest, and only lingered as long as he did to share those things with Harry, to give him a secret and a memory to keep.

The third, that he can still hear the laughter over that water.

He dies to the sound of it.

 **The End.**


End file.
